It may not be possible to automate all of SEO (or other business processes) with software, but that doesn’t mean you can’t avoid the chores in SEO. If you can document the processes, you can delegate them to virtual assistants (VA).

(A virtual assistant is an assistant you work with online rather than in person. VAs are typically contractors rather than salaried employees, so they’re also likely to be cheaper than a secretary if you don’t need them full time.)

Right now, I’m experimenting with documenting those of my processes that involve brainless chore work.

By documenting, I mean breaking down the process into steps. Someone completely unfamiliar with the field should be able to read it and understand.

There’s little reason for me to do these instead of an assistant. This is all the more so because when I’m not motivated, as when I’m doing chores, I’m slow. So besides being bored to tears with some parts of SEO, I get less done than an assistant could.

Once the processes are documented, my goal is to break them down into individual steps and assign those to various virtual assistants.

The reasons I don’t want to trust one assistant doing the whole process are that:

1) It means greater risk if he/she trips up anywhere – the lack of a fallback means that a whole project could be delayed.
2) Giving the whole process to one particular VA could lead to it being mass-duplicated-and-abused. It’s not that these are short-term techniques, but it’s easy to imagine how the whole technique – both as executed by poor quality and high quality SEOs – could be devalued as a result of the shoddy folks’ work.
3) I want to limit my costs if the work isn’t done properly.

My friend and fellow SEO consultant Jon Rognerud suggested VAs to me at SMX West 2008, but I didn’t know how to go about working with them. I read Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek and basically paraphrased the above points from my memory of his book.

Tim recommends companies over individuals because if the virtual assistant who is assigned to you gets sick or is unavailable for some reason, you can quickly get a replacement if you’re with a company.

The problem is that most VA companies also do “SEO” work. I put “SEO” in quotation marks because I’m skeptical about the quality of these companies’ work.

So if I outsourced to one of these companies – even if it were just part of the process – it would go to hell in a handbasket.

It would appear as a service offered by ‘SEO India’ companies. And then it would be duplicated by their rivals. And pretty soon the whole thing would be devalued, even when done properly.

So I’m aiming to hire individuals with NO background at all in SEO. And I’m not even presenting the job ads as something SEO related.

Which is why I had to document my processes first – I didn’t want to rely on the existing processes of crummy foreign SEO companies.

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Comments

You've nailed it yet again :) Splitting any SEO work up among several VAs is a great idea - we even split it up among internal employees. The layer of protection it adds for you as a business owner is far better than any NCND could ever provide because only you know the entire process.

List development definitely. Once you've identified and broken the process down, it's pretty straightforward actually.
For KR, I tried that before and paid like $200 for a couple dozen keywords. I would not outsource that, especially when there are great tools like Spyfu you can use instead. (See my endorsements page.)
What would you outsource?
Cheers
Gab

Hi Gab,
Great Post! I've just started using VAs for various labor intensive tasks that can easily be broken down into easy to follow steps and I'm loving it. In reference to a comment above, I shy away from the initial work to set up the processes and document each step as well, but once you get it done it's so great to just shoot off an email and a day or two later have someone deliver the completed work with no time (and very little cost) on your part.
I can't believe I didn't start this sooner.

hey Rob,
Yeah, it is great for some of these tasks - but I'm finding that the more a task involves critical thinking or taking the initiative and the less it can just be delegated to a VA.
Wish there was a better way to this...

Agree with the strategy of dispersing the knowledge to prevent replication however on the whole I find outsourcing far harder that people make out.
Lets face it if the outsourcers in low cost countries really understood any where near enough about SEO or Internet Marketing to be of real value to your business then they would be making a nice almost passive living off a couple of Adsense or CPA sites rather than selling their time for a few $ a hour.
Its like the old "super salesman" that does want to work on straight commission but insists on a rentainer + commission.
Once you know how it works why would you do it for someone else to profit from ?